Page 41 of Cursed Wolf

He never picked up.

Work kept me busy up to a point. Annika and Joey could immediately tell something was up. After some goading, I ended up confessing to them what had happened between Tryn and me. Those two were the closest thing I had to friends, after all.

“He’s probably married, like you thought at the beginning,” Annika said, viciously stabbing a receipt onto the check spindle.

“Even if he’s not married, he’s hiding something,” Joey agreed. “I mean, he pretty much told you that straight out, but the job thing’s got to be bullshit.”

The job thing was just such a convenient excuse, and not a great one at that. What could have possibly happened that he had to dash off in the middle of the night?

On my next day off, I was on a walk on the trail around my apartment, as though keeping my body busy would help to forget what he’d done to me.

I wanted to be angry. I wanted to find that confidence he drew out of me in the bedroom and use it to stand up to his lies. I wanted to find him and demand the truth. Didn’t I deserve that, at least?

But the truth was, I was deeply hurt. I felt rejected. Not good enough. My biggest fear was that he left my bed that night to crawl into someone else’s, and I wondered why he’d choose her over me. What did I do wrong? Why wasn’t I enough?

I rubbed my chest as I walked, trying to soothe the permanent ache that seemed to settle there since he left. It felt like our connection had been a thread between us, at first strong and tethering, drawing us closer together. But him leaving had unraveled that thread, stretched it beyond the limit of its strength, and now it was frayed and damaged.

On top of all that, I was also ridiculously horny, which didn’t help things.

The morning after Tryn left, I’d forgotten for a moment and reached for him in bed. Before my eyes opened, I had a smile on my lips. He’d probably enjoy waking up to a blowjob. I still had a piece of that confident sex goddess he’d drawn out of me, and I was more than prepared to take him into my mouth. Maybe then he’d be unable to resist fucking me. He’d drag me up his body until I was straddling him. He’d penetrate me deep, bouncing me on his cock while his teeth found my neck…

But the bed was cold, empty. And the night before came rushing back to me. His goodbye probably took under a minute, and I replayed every word in my head. Every ‘sorry’, every moment of eye contact and when he looked away. The one conclusion I kept returning to was that he was being dishonest.

Despite knowing that and feeling so wounded from it, I couldn’t stop craving him physically.

I wrung orgasm after orgasm out of myself, using my one trusty vibrator, my fingers, the showerhead, everything. And it was never enough. I couldn’t even get there unless I was thinking of him.

I felt pathetic and lovesick, because I really was starting to fall for him. I wanted to howl my lungs out with all the frustration and pain of rejection, the utter fucking loneliness in his absence.

“What’s happening to me?” I asked the question with my face turned up to the shower, the water running cold. This wasn’t me. I didn’t fall apart over men like this. But then again, I’d never fallen this hard for one either.

No answer came from the running water, but I knew something in me had fundamentally changed since meeting Tryn. I had never been this pathetic over a guy before, never been so convinced that he could be the one for me and then so shattered when I turned out to be wrong.

“Maybe I just need therapy.” I shut the shower off.

My bedroom was bathed in silver from the full moon that night, bright as any street lamp outside my window. I tried not to think about how Tryn called me beautiful when I wore nothing but the moon’s light.

Strangely, the moon gave me an odd sense of comfort as I crawled into bed. Something about that round rock in the sky filled me with enough peace that I started drifting off to sleep, an assurance that this was just one of the many cycles in my life.

When morning came, the loneliness rushed in just as fiercely as it had in the days before. The ache in my chest wasn’t as sharp, but that didn’t make me feel better. It felt like I’d been sleeping under a block of ice and had gone numb.

I reached for my phone before I was even fully awake and hit the call button next to Tryn’s number without any of the clarity or resolve from the night before. I might have had the book smarts to call myself a doctor, but in this, I was a painfully slow learner.

The answer became clear to me though, as his phone rang and rang without getting picked up.

Chapter 14

Tryn

Emmaline should be here. That was my constant thought as I ran with my pack under the full moon. The moon I would rather curse out than howl at in that moment. It was because of the moon that I had to tear myself away from Emmaline, after all.

An hour after we began, Derric scented a buck and our run soon became a hunting party. Five of us took down the prey, but it was Sawyer who gave the killing strike to the windpipe. Once the buck lay dead, our pack howled a song of victory. Sawyer would take the biggest share of the meat and present it to his pregnant mate, proving himself a capable provider and protector.

I wasn’t normally an envious wolf. That kind of bitterness wasn’t my style, but I found Sawyer’s happy howls and barks grating my ears. His playful roughhousing with our packmates to burn off his remaining adrenaline seemed childish and obnoxious to me.

Any other time, I’d be proud of him. Our lone, prickly enforcer, a brother to me, had become a family man. He was settled, content. In love with his mate and excited for his pup to arrive.

It was only because my mate wasn’t at my side, because I had to leave her soft bed and warm body to be here, that I had these ugly, bitter thoughts. The human side of me knew that. But my wolf was a creature of instinct, not reason, and he wouldn’t stop sulking.

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